by Gillian Gill
rare achievement for a woman: In Dwight Garner’s profile of the new editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Stig Abell, in the New York Times of May 26, 2018, Garner cites the fact that, between its founding in 1902 and 1921, of the 1,036 contributors to the TLS, 81 were clergymen, 67 came out of the (then) all-male Oxford college Balliol, and 76 were women.
“for everybody, for nobody”: Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, First Series (New York: Harvest Books, 1925/1955), p. 119.
reference to or quotation from: In just the first three months of 2017, three such citations appeared in the New York Times Book Review. Monica Ali’s review of a novel by Rachel Cusk, on January 29, is called “A Room of Her Own”; Stacy Schiff, on March 26, mentions that each essay by Richard Holmes “can be read as a riff on Virginia Woolf’s sly observation that the actual length of a person’s life is open to dispute”; in a “By the Book” interview with Phillip Meyer on April 2, Meyer states, “I’ll usually start the day with Virginia Woolf.” More recently, on October 28, 2018, Carina Chocano opened her “First Words” essay in the New York Times Magazine with these words: “In 1931, Virginia Woolf spoke to members of the London and National Society for Women’s Service on the subject of her professional experiences as a woman.” Chocano goes on to note that Woolf acknowledged that her path as a woman writer had been “smoothed by Fanny Burney, by Aphra Behn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot,” and that she bitterly commented on the way the culture at large minimizes and scorns the physical experience of women. This essay was written in the aftermath of the furor over Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. In her “By the Book” interview of January 13, 2019, Dani Shapiro says she always has Woolf’s Writer’s Diary within reach “as part of the conversation I’ve been having with Woolf since I began reading her in my 20s.” Later in the interview, Shapiro notes that her ideal literary dinner party would consist of Woolf and Freud arguing, with Leonard Woolf as referee.
“a chain of women who”: Angelica Garnett, prologue to Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), p. 12.
1. Virginia Woolf’s Indian Ancestresses
“If you want to know where”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Six, 1936–1941, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980), p. 461.
“Antoine de l’Etang was one”: Julia Margaret Cameron, Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women, with Introductions by Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry (London: Hogarth Press, 1926; London: A & W Visual Library, 1973, with a preface, corrections, and notes by Tristram Powell), p. 13. Citations refer to the 1973 edition, which was also published by David R. Godine, in Boston.
“His person was pleasing”: Quentin Bell, Virginia Woolf (New York: Harcourt, 1972), vol. 1, p. 14.
“The Chevalier de l’Etang was”: Cameron, Victorian Photographs, p. 21.
“This was something I”: William Dalrymple, White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in Eighteenth-Century India (New York: Penguin Books, 2002), p. xlv. Virginia Woolf’s maternal grandmother, Maria Pattle Jackson, was the older sister of Sophia Pattle Dalrymple, William Dalrymple’s great-great-grandmother.
the bustling Franco-Indian port: The opening sequences of the movie The Life of Pi are set in the charming old Franco-Indian quarter in Pondicherry.
This paucity of portraits: Thanks in no small measure to the Pattle descendants William Dalrymple and Deborah Spooner, there has in the last few years been a small explosion of information about the de l’Etangs and the Pattles on the internet. Just in 2018–19, interest in Thérèse has increased, and two sketches of her have turned up on the web—the work, as far as I can determine, of her fifth great-granddaughter Deborah Spooner. Wikitree now offers a very much more accurate family tree, and the extensive professional career of Antoine de l’Etang in the military and in various equestrian centers in northern India has been researched.
the queen’s final months: I started to feel for Marie Antoinette when I read about her final year of imprisonment. Her young son was torn away from her and placed in the hands of cruel men. She was forced to watch as the severed head of her best friend, the Duchess de Polignac, was paraded back and forth in front of her window. At the end Marie Antoinette suffered from constant vaginal bleeding, was obliged to change her clothing in front of her guards, and had no secret place to hide her blood-stained rags. Wearing a pure white dress on the tumbrel and as she knelt before the guillotine was an act of valor that any woman who has blushed from menstrual stains will salute.
a miniature by a French artist: In 1930, Virginia Woolf’s stepbrother Sir George Duckworth gave her a miniature that a cousin of his had left him, of “old Pattle surrounded by wife and daughters done in France.” The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume Four, 1929–1931, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), pp. 144 and 214. Scholars at Smith College, which owns a copy of the Pattle family group portrait, believe that James Pattle had remained in India and was painted in later.
“Isabel reveled in the freedom”: Ros Black, A Talent for Humanity: The Life and Work of Lady Henry Somerset (Chippenham and Eastbourne, UK: Antony Rowe Publishing, 2010), p. 8.
“Dr Jackson’s half-French wife”: “A Sketch of the Past,” in Virginia Woolf: Moments of Being, edited with an introduction and notes by Jeanne Schulkind, 2nd ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1985), p. 85. Hereafter cited as Woolf, Moments of Being.
“this [late-eighteenth-century] promiscuous”: Dalrymple, White Mughals, p. xlv.
Lytton Strachey’s astonished protest: Lytton Strachey’s friend and fellow Cambridge Apostle E. M. Forster, through his war service in Egypt, his visits to India, and his interracial friendships and loves, made the leap out of racial prejudice into connection, as did Leonard Woolf. Forster’s acknowledged masterpiece A Passage to India was another novel that Lytton Strachey, whose literary taste was usually unerring, found it hard to praise and harder to like. See Wendy Moffat’s superb A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010).
Virginia Woolf sardonically noted: Virginia Woolf to Violet Dickinson, The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume One, 1888–1912, edited by Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 202.
“[Florence] said that my diamond”: Ibid., p. 164.
Julie, Antoinette, and Virginie: The name Julie became popular following the publication in 1761 of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s horrendously long, nauseatingly sentimental, and inexplicably popular epistolary novel Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. Paul et Virginie (1787), by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, was another massive bestseller in Europe but at least mercifully short. As I remember, Virginie dies in a shipwreck at the end of the novel because she is too virginal to take off her clothes. I mention this since the way that her name seemed to define her as a sexual being will, as we shall see, haunt Virginia Woolf.
names passed down in: As my reader can see from the family tree that opens this chapter, Adeline the second was Adeline Pattle Mackenzie (1814–1838), Adeline de l’Etang Pattle’s eldest daughter. Adeline Pattle Mackenzie’s younger sister Maria Pattle Jackson (Virginia Woolf’s maternal grandmother) named her first child Adeline, so Adeline Maria Jackson Vaughan (1837–1881) is Adeline the third. Virginia Somers, the sixth Pattle sister, named her elder daughter (the future Duchess of Bedford) Adeline Marie, so she was Adeline the fourth. Finally—according to the limited family tree we have—Julia Stephen named her third daughter Adeline Virginia Stephen after her sister Adeline Vaughan and her aunt Virginia, Countess Somers. Thus, our Virginia Woolf was, according to official records, Adeline the fifth. The name Julie, or Julia in English, was passed down from Julie-Antoinette-Adeline de l’Etang Pattle to her second daughter, Julia Margaret Pattle Cameron, on to Julia Cameron’s daughter Julia Cameron Norman, and to her niece
Julia Jackson Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s mother.
Woolf got this salacious: Quentin Bell, in his biography of Virginia Woolf, goes one better by writing that “James Pattle was, we are told, an extravagantly wicked man . . . known as the greatest liar in India” who also drank himself to death. Bell, Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 14.
He and Adeline were married: A very battered portrait of James and Adeline Pattle hung in the servants’ hall in the dark basement at 22 Hyde Park Gate, where Virginia Woolf grew up. Annan, Leslie Stephen, p. 105. That picture seems not to have survived.
as much of the rum: When I visited Quebec City recently, a guide recounted how early French colonists in Canada often wished to be buried in their native France, and that the corpses were preserved in barrels of rum. When the funeral barrels from Canada were offloaded upon arrival in Europe, they were often suspiciously light—the rum had been drunk en route.
“beautiful dead Pattles”: Entry for January 19, 1918, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf:Volume One, 1915–1919, edited by Anne Olivier Bell with an introduction by Quentin Bell (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977), p. 107.
2. Pattledom
stories of “Pattledom”: Sir Henry Taylor, a distinguished scientist and devoted friend of Julia Cameron, is said to have coined the name Pattledom. Virginia Woolf seized on the term.
“Once when we were children”: Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, p. 87.
the East India Company: The English East India Company (EIC) began in 1600 as a trading company with a monopoly on trade with the then vaguely mapped and understood East Indies. It remained a privately held shareholding enterprise, with its own army and its own board of governors, and by the late eighteenth century its profits were almost too huge to grasp. For example, in 1783, eager to ensure its trading privileges, the EIC was able to loan the British government one million MORE pounds to finance the wars with the French in North America. By 1820 the EIC had not only a huge slice of all the trade with the subcontinent but had also taken over the tax collection system of larger and larger areas of India, thus offering even humble tax collectors unrivaled opportunities to line their own pockets at the expense of rural communities. For several centuries India was the source of unlimited funds for the English mercantile class. William Makepeace Thackeray’s family had deep roots in Anglo-India, and in Vanity Fair he gives a devastating portrait of the returning “Nabob” in Jos Sedgwick—fat, idle, stupid, and rich.
“He was the fool”: Virginia Woolf, Night and Day (Bristol, UK: CuriousPages, 2016), p. 86.
Indian homonym Patel: Michael Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History: The Dramatic Lives of Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, and Their Remarkable Families (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008). Holroyd notices that Pattle might once have been Patel: “It was inconvenient for the family having a name that approximated so closely with the indigenous Indian surname Patel since that gave rise to dark stories (that an ancestor had married the daughter of a high-class Bengali)” (p. 32). As we have seen, the “dark stories” were confirmed by the Indian historian and Pattle descendant William Dalrymple in 2003, even though a Bengali woman who married a European colonist could not pass on her family name.
Little Holland House: By the 1870s, with London putting out its tentacles, and with cow pastures in Kensington becoming densely packed streets like Hyde Park Gate, where the Stephen family lived, the Hollands decided to develop their Little Holland House property.
Josiah Wedgwood, the scion: Jenny Uglow gives a stirring account of the intellectual brilliance as well as the commercial acumen of the Wedgwoods in her book The Lunar Men (2002).
his poet sister Christina: While preparing her Rossetti review, Woolf wrote in her diary that “Christina has the great distinction of being a born poet . . . but if I were bringing a case against God, she is one of the first witnesses I would call. First she starved herself of love, which also meant life; then of poetry in deference to what she thought her religion demanded.” Entry for August 4, 1918, in The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 178.
Barbara’s first cousin Florence: From the age of Victoria till after World War I, in England everyone who was anyone seems to have known everyone else, even if they did not choose to invite them all to tea or dinner. An astonishing number of them were related by blood and marriage. Thus, to take a random sample, Florence Nightingale was first cousin to the pioneering feminist and artist Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon—though Barbara’s illegitimate birth made it impossible for the two cousins ever in their lives to be in the same room. For more on this see my book Nightingales (New York: Ballantine Books, 2005). Another of Florence’s cousins, Blanche Smith, married Arthur Clough, a poet educated at the Rugby School under Dr. Thomas Arnold, whose poems are devoutly quoted in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, the famous novel by Thomas Hughes, who was a close friend of Leslie Stephen and another guest at Dimbola Lodge and Little Holland House. To continue with the Arnold connection, the successful and fiercely anti-feminist novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward, whose literary example would terrify Virginia Woolf, was one of Dr. Arnold’s granddaughters. Sarah Pattle Prinsep’s granddaughter Laura Gurney married Sir Thomas Troubridge, and their son Ernest married Una Taylor. Una Troubridge was the lover (not the wife! as the editor Tristram Powell mistakenly believed) of Radclyffe Hall, who was born a woman and wrote The Well of Loneliness—and Una Troubridge was one of the first translators of Colette. I could go on. It was a very small world. One of the key texts here is Noel Annan’s essay “The Intellectual Aristocracy,” reprinted in The Dons (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 304–41. Alas, the essay contains not a single reference to the sources that inform it!
George du Maurier: One of the minor characters in George du Maurier’s famous play Trilby is supposedly based on Val Prinsep, and Ellen Terry may have been an inspiration for Trilby herself.
the Pattle descendant Henrietta: Henrietta Garnett, Wives and Stunners: The Pre-Raphaelites and Their Muses (New York: Macmillan, 2012).
“the tactical hypocrisy”: Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Norton, 2003), p. 120.
the Prinseps’ resident artist: This story has recently been retold, on the basis of extensive research, by the renowned English biographer Michael Holroyd. For the following account of Ellen Terry and Pattledom I am indebted to his book A Strange Eventful History. Holroyd became very seriously ill when researching this book and lost his research notes. Thus, as he explains in his graceful introduction, he offers none of the extensive notes and scholarly apparatus of his earlier work. I thus quote Holroyd’s book and assume his quotations and paraphrases are reliable.
hands-on management: In Woolf’s essay on Julia Cameron, Sarah’s older sister, Woolf gleefully recounts how, when confronted with a clergyman wearing filthy neck linen in her local parish, Mrs. Prinsep collected the linen of all the parish clergy and had it washed, starched, and ironed to her exacting standards in her own laundry. Cameron, Victorian Photographs, p. 14.
Ellen Ternan, the woman: Ternan and her mother and sisters were all professional actors, and, like the Terrys, fiercely set on respectability. For over forty years they managed to conceal or deny the fact that Ellen had been Dickens’s mistress. Now we know that Charles Dickens and Nelly were lovers and that the respectable Mrs. Ternan was not only cognizant of but complicit in her daughter’s lucrative extramarital relationship. See Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (New York: Viking, 1990).
“emotionally unstable, sexually”: Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 32. Watts married again, and his second wife, who was devoted to him, once admitted that her husband “couldn’t do very much but he liked to fumble around.”
“It makes your nose swell”: Here I adhere closely to the account given by Michael Holroyd, based, as far as I can tell, on various biographies of Watts, including Wilfrid Blunt’s England’s Michelangelo: A Biography of George F. Watts (London: Hamilton, 1975
).
greatest woman actor: The charming, if rather run-down, Ellen Terry Museum at Smallhythe Place in Tenterden, Kent, charts the theatrical career of this great Victorian actor. The museum’s most valuable and astonishing piece on display is the dress encrusted in iridescent shells that Terry wore as Lady Macbeth. A famous portrait of Terry, by John Singer Sargent, shows her in this dress. A couple of the Watts portraits of the young Ellen, either originals or copies, are also part of the Smallhythe collection.
This museum, one of the more modest properties under the National Trust, suffers for lack of money. When we were having tea in the barn, my brother and I had to avoid the shower of bird droppings coming down from a hole in the roof. On the other hand, the picturesque, rambling Tudor house and its charming gardens at the back remain largely the same as they were when Ellen and her daughter, Edy Craig, lived there, an advantage for a literary historian like myself.
cool, form-fitting garments: The Honourable Mrs. Edward Twistleton-Wickham-Fiennes, “observing the flowing uncorseted garb of the Pattle ladies and the general laisser-aller of the social life, began to suspect ‘grave moral defect,’” but she was American by birth, so she didn’t really count. Holroyd, A Strange Eventful History, p. 32.
the Pattle paisley shawls: Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1983), p. 46.
“I longed to arrest all”: Cameron, Victorian Photographs, p. 9.
Charles Hay Cameron: Charles Hay Cameron enjoys a rather longer entry in the early Dictionary of National Biography, near his wife’s. He was another remarkable Victorian and often referred to as a Benthamite, someone who subscribed to a system of nonreligious ethics and financial principles designed to ensure the best possible life for the greatest number of people. Bentham advocated freedom of expression, equal rights for women, abolition of slavery, abolition of the death penalty, animal rights, and the decriminalization of homosexual acts.